


until the moonflower blooms

by contagiousiridescence



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Additional ending, Canon Compliant, Death, F/F, Older Jamie, angst but also like not really?, dead doesn't mean gone, no particular reason for this other than the ending made me REALLY SAD, so I gave them a slightly better one I think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27111541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contagiousiridescence/pseuds/contagiousiridescence
Summary: Love is a strange creature, Jamie learns. A loyal creature that, much like a plant, grows under tender care and blossoms with such beauty that there really is nothing else like it in the world. Like a moonflower. Perhaps the body of it may die, as all bodies do. But the roots of it are still there, and that lovely, wonderful pale blossom never asks more of her than she can give, even once it’s gone. But then, as young Flora had once said-- dead didn’t really mean gone.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 9
Kudos: 143





	until the moonflower blooms

**Author's Note:**

> I'm just really sad about them okay

There is a certain stillness in death. 

Jamie has been around enough of it to notice that quiet weight, like a cloak so heavy it makes her shoulders ache from the effort of dragging it with every step. It doesn’t get any lighter in the years that follow in the wake of a death, and sometimes, with every added loss, only grows heavier as she grows older. Each year that she remains behind among the living is another year of stillness, of weight, that presses down on her spine with the weary sort of exhaustion that can’t be alleviated by sleep or caffeine. 

She’s grown used to the stillness. To that silent presence wrapped around her body, heart, and soul. It hurts, sometimes. Like hooks sunk into her skin, tugging at her bones until it unravels the pain she’d learned to tuck away for later. There are days when Jamie just lays against the pillows of her garden bench, staring at the grey nothing of the overcast sky above her, and feels the prickle of iron thorns that cage what’s left of her old, weary heart in brambles twisted together to spell out names she vows to never forget. Dominic. Charlotte. Rebecca. Hannah. 

Dani. 

Yet Jamie has come to learn over the years she spends alone and walled behind those brambles that Dani isn’t a thorn. She’s not embedded into Jamie’s heart with pain and torture, the way the others ache and smart against the inside of her ribs with every inhale. She did at first, of course. Every thought, every memory, was a wicked blade carving off piece after piece until Jamie’s heart was whittled down into a mere splinter. And she’d thought-- she’d been resigned to it then-- that there was no hope for that little twig to blossom anew, for her heart to regrow after that pain and flourish again. It was simply driftwood, and someday she reckoned it would join all of those other old, dead things buried into the soil to eventually be dug out and burned to ash. 

Perhaps it was already burned to ash, she thinks sometimes. Perhaps that is why Dani’s name doesn’t butcher that poor lump of coal in Jamie’s chest any longer. 

So she sits in that stillness. She drifts in it, as though watching the rest of the world turn around her from behind a veil that she can’t see, but she can feel it draped over her eyes, weighted down. But Jamie knows now that there is a strange peace to that stillness. A tranquility that, while mournful in its existence, is also gentle in its own right. 

She noticed it when Henry died a couple years after Flora's wedding. Standing in the background of his funeral-- and God, did she understand then why Dani had never wanted to go to another funeral-- she felt that stillness shrouded over the church, a blanket that once might have suffocated her under the weight, under the sheer enormity that death seemed to embody. But not now. Now, Jamie stands at the back of the room, behind all of the wooden pews, and gazes at the slope of old Henry Wingrave’s nose. The shape of his frail, gnarled fingers clasped over his breast peeking out over the edge of his open coffin at the far end of the aisle. She sees these things, and she thinks of him-- of Bly Manor, of his brother and sister-in-law, of the two children who had driven her absolutely bonkers during the summers, and all of that fierce, radiant love that had bound them together like pearls strung on a necklace. 

As Jamie watches over the procession of mourning people, she thinks of Dani and everything she gave so that Henry and his adopted children might reach this point in their lives. So that Jamie could grow old and bear witness to their passing with that blanket heavy on her shoulders to keep her company in the stillness that followed. 

Jamie is thankful, as she always is. Dani was a gift to this earth, and she can’t think of anything more significant-- or poignant-- than giving a life to save countless others. 

Henry’s death doesn’t hurt like the others. Aches, maybe, as death is wont to do. There’s no escaping that ache, but Jamie is accustomed to it, if not at least a bit relieved because the ache means there is _something_ left of that old whittled down heart of hers. Owen’s death hurts more, as she expected it would. It’s a deep, soul-rending kind of ache that settles down into her marrow until she feels as though maybe her veins are filled with lead. Should she have waded into that pond now, surely Jamie would have sunk like an anchor to the very bottom. 

But she doesn’t. She knows better than to scorn Dani’s gift like that. 

After all, she would have missed the birth of little Charlotte Danielle, Flora’s daughter born some five years after Henry’s passing. A lovely little thing, really. Round-cheeked and bright eyed, with a little pouted mouth that made Jamie think _troublemaker_ the moment she’d set eyes on the infant. Big ears, just like her mother, that she would eventually grow into. And a giggle that could make even the most malicious of ghosts stop and listen in wonder. Flora hadn’t remembered the story of Bly Manor any more than someone did a ghost story told ‘round a fire at camp, but she'd told Jamie in secret that the name “Danielle” had stuck with some kind of reverent, unconditional kindness in her mind afterward. It was a quality that Flora had wanted to cultivate in her daughter as she grew older. Jamie thought there was no name more perfectly suited to the task. 

Dani would have loved this little child. Jamie thinks somewhere in death-- somewhere in that great wide world of ghosts and spirits that her love had chosen to suffer-- she believes Dani does, indeed, love little Charlotte Danielle, just as much as she loves Flora and Miles. 

Love is a strange creature, Jamie learns. A loyal creature that, much like a plant, grows under tender care and blossoms with such beauty that there really is nothing else like it in the world. Like a moonflower. Perhaps the body of it may die, as all bodies do. Yet the roots of it are still there, and that lovely, wonderful pale blossom never asks more of her than she can give, even once it’s gone. But then, as young Flora had once said-- dead didn’t really mean gone. 

In moments like these, when Jamie is surrounded by the stillness, when her breath feels just the slightest bit shallow in her lungs and there’s a familiar sort of buzz humming just under her skin, she likes to remember all that she can of Bly Manor. Of the love she encountered there. And yes, even the hurt and the sorrow. She can never separate the two, much as she tried in the years following Dani’s death. So she learns to take it all in, live in it, and let it follow her. 

She remembers a conversation she and Dani had all that time ago. They hadn’t been in love then. But looking back, Jamie knows in the deepest recesses of herself that the light in Dani had awakened something in her even back at the beginning. Something inside herself that made her stay behind to bask in it, drawn in a little closer each day. Like a flower tilting toward the sun. 

Love is not possession, Dani had said. Even now, wrinkled and pepper-salt as Jamie is in the old age that somehow had yet to claim her for the dirt, she feels the truth of those words just as strongly, just as warm and clear and golden as the first time she heard them. They sit nestled in her chest, behind all of the brambles that still prick her with pains and misery. A balm, she thinks. Something to soothe those old wounds, something to protect the little sliver of her heart still ticking away in her breast. It had taken Jamie a long time to understand those words the way Dani had from the start. Or maybe she had just refused to at first, because the loss of Dani had eviscerated her to such a degree that even the thought of love was enough to send her spiraling into bouts of anger and despair. 

She gets it now, she thinks. Now that the stillness has quieted the angry bleating of her tiny, shriveled heart. Soothed it to a gentle thrum where she can keep all of the pieces of Dani, and Owen, and Hannah and the others safe and sound. Not her possessions, but her charges, the little pieces freely given for her to protect and nurture. 

Jamie had told herself she would never return to Bly Manor. In fact, the manor itself seemed to have taken that promise to heart. Bly was not marked on any map, and over the years even the townsfolk had forgotten which path through the woods led to the manor that had seen so many horrors in its time. Even Jamie thought that after so long, surely she, too, would have lost the map once seared into her memory, since all things of Bly seem to be eaten away with time. 

But, well. Jamie had always been the stubborn sort. 

She’s seventy-three when she eventually makes the trip. Her hair returns to its wild curls, short framed around her jaw and untamed the way she’d left it when she worked as the groundskeeper. The pepper-salt once streamed through those locks have turned to a snowy white, pure as a dove’s wing. She’s got deep lines around her mouth and crow’s feet pinched at the corners of her eyes, which she thinks is ridiculous because these are lines of laughter, and when, truly, could she have suffered enough laughter to leave permanent marks in her skin? 

Ah, but those memories of Dani and the others she holds so dear. They were a source of joy to her now, of happiness and love and laughter that has kept her strong in her old age. 

“It’s your fault I’m a decrepit old woman,” she’d grumbled at Owen’s gravestone one bleak, dreary day. “All of those damned puns you made and your stupidly fantastic cooking. When I see you again, best believe I’ll be sortin’ you out over these wrinkles. You would have made them look good. I've got lines on my damn lips!” 

_Nonsense, love_ , she imagined him whisper in her ear, as if plucked out of a memory. _They look quite dashing on you, I say. Like a finely pummeled dough._

“I’ll show you pummeled dough, you eejit,” she answered back, with a scoffing laugh that never could quite stop haunting her whenever that silly cook came to mind. She’d huffed out the rest of her reedy laughter and poured some of his favorite wine into the dirt. A toast to a love that only they remembered, that only they shared for the others lost to death and time. 

And then it was just her that remained with Bly still lodged in her memory. 

She’s even more wrinkled when she returns to the manor. Pale, soft skin speckled in liver spots sags off the meager muscle still clinging to her bones. Her joints are stiff and her fingers bent in odd directions from the arthritis that's weaseled its way into every bit of cartilage it could find. But it doesn’t stop her from caring for her plants or from wandering up and down the cemetery to visit old friends. 

And it certainly doesn’t stop her from trudging through the overgrown woods of Bly, in no particular direction other than the one her heart seems intent to follow. In her imagination she likes to picture the plants she’d loved and nurtured were leading her there, like good children taking her hand and drawing her toward the place she thought would be forever lost. 

It takes surprisingly little time to reach, all things considered. 

The shape of the manor is a bit worse for wear without anyone to tend to its upkeep. When Jamie comes through the trees and up the once-graveled drive-way, she can see the indent of the roof where the tiling had eventually fallen through to the attic. Some of the windows are broken in, and to her surprise, a rather significant amount of ivy has threaded through the panels and sills until practically half of the entire manor is bursting with thick, deep emerald leaves. It’s strange for her to see; the manor had been a place of so much death and strife that to see life thriving so well from the house’s very bones felt oddly poetic. 

Then again, her memories of Bly were nothing if not poetry. 

“Figures you’d be a bloody mess without me,” she says aloud to the looming manor, before swiftly cursing the abandoned wilds that had quite greedily taken over the garden she once cared for with painstaking effort. Her naughty children overrun in some places and barren in others, until even the most subtle of her touches had been forgotten. Even those old stone statues that had so fascinated little Flora had worn back from the elements until hardly a recognizable shape to their features could be determined amongst the moss and crumbled concrete. Faceless, thoughtless. 

But Jamie remembered. When others had forgotten, she’d kept those memories close, locked down with an intensity that scared off anything brave enough to pry them from her grip. She remembered the shape of each hedge, the height of the lush grass that dominated the property, the same way that the faces of her loved ones were still stark in her mind’s eye some fifty or so years later. Never fading, as much as the stillness tried to rub away at the edges and blur the smallest, insignificant details. She sometimes likened this resilience to the same will that kept Viola walking the grounds of Bly. Not fueled by the rage that had so corrupted Viola's obstinate soul, but by love still rooted firmly in her own. A love that would always bring her home with Dani forever safe in her memories. 

So in all of her crooked, aged vigor, Jamie takes up the gardening tools she’d brought through the woods, and gets to work. 

She doesn’t go to the lake at first. She starts at the edges of the woods, close to the cottage and greenhouse where her work used to begin each morning. The building itself is rotten through from decades of disuse, but it holds, miraculously. She spends days just cleaning out all of the dust and animal scat and removing all the cobwebs, swearing at each one with loud complaint and wondering how in the hell Hannah managed it each and every day in a house five times larger than the groundskeeper shed.

Jamie starts on the edge of the garden next, careful to maintain the brush the way she last recalled it. Her moonflowers had long since withered away from the trellis she’d so carefully wrapped them around, but she’d not been surprised. She doesn’t plant any more of them. She does pot some other new plants, each one chosen for one particular reason or another that makes her think of her friends, and she speaks to them as if their spirits could hear her through those flowers. To Hannah’s lilies she regales stories of the children now middle-aged and flourishing, and of little Charlotte Danielle who had a knack for theater and a love for all manner of creature. She chastises Owen’s vegetable garden for letting the rabbits have a nibble, and Lord, she even finds herself crafting all sorts of terrible puns, just for the sake of knowing Owen’s snorting laughter would have resulted. For the late Wingraves, Jamie throws herself at the roses that have simply exploded all over the place. She cuts them back and shapes them into some semblance of order again, all the while minding the thorns that catch on her jeans or on the soft yield of her skin.

The ivy on the house remains untouched. Jamie doesn’t consider herself terribly superstitious-- it's all a bunch of shite to her, really-- but there’s a mote of comfort in the thought that the life unfurled from this old manor should be left to its own devices. It was there for a reason, she’d decided. Best leave it to the dead to figure whether it belonged or not. 

It takes her a long while to finally make her way toward Dani’s final resting place. She hadn’t really wanted to see it, nor even look in its direction out of the throbbing fear she might catch a glimpse of her beautiful girl there, and then all of her careful work to keep herself sane over the years would have been torn away. She didn’t want to lose herself here the way the others did. Yet, Jamie hadn’t come all this way just to pull out weeds again from Bly Manor’s sprawling grounds. She hadn’t fought back all of her anxious doctors just to bury herself in plants and distant dreams. 

“Mornin’, Poppins,” Jamie says, standing amongst the sweeping reeds that droop long and flowing against each other, sprung out of the peat that surrounds the water. She doesn’t see any trace of Dani there. No glimmer of movement out of the corner of her eye, no ripple of a reflection that isn’t weathered and white-haired. There was a real possibility that her Dani might’ve forgotten her after spending so long tethered to Viola’s restless spirit as it wandered through the abandoned manor. It was perhaps this possibility that had hurt the worst of all when Dani had died-- the thought that her sweet, beautiful Dani would become a faceless, loveless creature the way the Lady of Bly had, for time was not a forgiving or merciful force of nature. It was perhaps this reason entirely that Jamie clung to her memories so fiercely, like a dragon protecting her treasure from the wretched hands that once stole Owen’s mother from him long before her death. 

If Dani could not remember, then Jamie would just have to remember enough for the both of them. 

She tells the story of Bly Manor to the pond much the same as she did to Flora the night before her wedding. It’s the most comfortable way to recall each memory, jumbled as they are in her thoughts when she remembers each piece. She laughs where it’s warranted, sheds a tear or two when the reminders are just slightly too heavy to bear dry-eyed, and scowls at each and every mention of Peter fucking Quint. If she embellishes her distain for him while recounting Bly Manor's history, well, then, he had it coming. 

And she makes sure to tell the other stories, too. Hannah’s, Rebecca’s, the little boy with no face or name, even the plague doctor with the beaked mask she’d personally never set eyes on. All of them with their stories told as best she could remember, as best as she’d been told by those who had known of them and their untimely demise. 

She speaks of Perdita carefully, and Viola even moreso. She sings in that cracked, terribly unmelodic voice of hers that blasted _O’ Willow Waly_ song she’d heard Flora hum about the grounds way back then. A sad song, she finds, but a fitting one. The bubble that drifts up to the surface of the water makes her think that the ladies of the lake agree. 

“You see, Poppins,” Jamie says, sat at the edge of the water. “That’s the thing about love. It is a sad thing, isn’t it? To lose something wound so deeply into your being that its loss leaves behind a gaping hole. A chasm. But the other thing about love-- the best thing about it-- is how it heals that emptiness. Even when I lost you, I knew I would be alright-- eventually. I could heal, because you loved me so wholly, so purely, and I gave myself to you in all ways imaginable. I still do, now.” She twists the golden ring on her finger and brushes her thumb across the _claddagh_ stamped into the metal. “I suppose that’s how it works when you fall for your best friend. You’ll always be, you know.” 

When she takes in a breath, Jamie feels a twinge inside her lungs. That little spike of pain her doctors had made all that fuss over. She doesn’t mind it now, breathing in the air she’d once thought stank of stagnant water, wet earth, and death. 

“You told me once that love is not possession,” Jamie continues, twisting her ring all the while. “We were talking about Pe-- about _him_ , and Beca, how terribly unhealthy they were together. I promised to never treat you that way, to never let the thought even cross my mind. You were never mine to take. Never mine to claim or to possess. But I like to think you gave little pieces for me to hold, to protect and keep safe. And I like to think that I did a damned good job of it.” 

She chuckles, mostly to herself. It’s a bit wet sounding even to her old ears. 

“One day I knew I’d see you again,” Jamie whispers now. It’s tempting for the first time in decades so go diving back into those waters where the bones of her beloved lay sprawled in the murky pond bottom. She leans forward to take in her reflection in the water, searching for that face she’d searched for in reflections for years, but it’s just her own face blinking back from the silvery, bobbing surface. “Some day, love. And then we can walk the manor together. I can help you with your beast in the jungle. And that, I think, sounds perfectly splendid.” 

Her tears fall from her cheeks before she knows they’re there, and they drip into the water at the shore with rings that undulate outward in slow-growing circles. She watches the rings spread and fade until they disappear amongst the ripples of wind. It reminds her of the ghosts that wandered here, and the lives that had waned as time slowly eroded away at their memories. 

_Not me,_ she thinks. _Not my memories. Not Dani._

Jamie continues this routine for three more weeks. She comes by the manor every day. She never sets foot inside the building itself, though the front door remains wide open. There are even muddy footprints leading a path inside. But she stays away from the house, and spends more time each day by the water, singing or cracking jokes or telling stories of people she thought Dani should know of. She never stays past dusk, either, always making sure to get back into town before the sun sets. 

The manual labor is certainly not friendly to her elderly bones. She huffs and puffs and wheezes more each day, bending over a wooden stick she finds in the woods to use as a cane, or pausing during her stories when her breath comes short and shallow. Her muscles ache, but they grow no stronger like they had when she was young and spry. Her body is done with growing, aside from growing old. But at least the weight of stillness is not so heavy now, she finds. It’s just there, like a comforting hand on her shoulder, a pressure that reminds her of everything she carries safely in her soul. And despite how her body fails her, her mind has never felt so lucid and free. 

“There’s not much left now,” Jamie tells the water, eyes half-lidded in her exhaustion. She's at the water's edge again, wincing against the dull pain that flares up in her joints and spine. “I’ve pulled all the weeds I can find, sheared all the bushes that I can shear. Can you believe I’m too damned old to be climbin’ up ladders and whatnot to trim all these blasted willow branches?” 

The lake doesn’t answer her. 

Jamie slowly wipes her hands on her cotton pants, her thoughts distant. “Well. I suppose it don’t matter much, really,” she says, to no one in particular. “This place will remain far longer than I, and there ain’t a soul alive aside from me who knows how to take care of it. What a shame.” 

She sits quietly as the sun begins to dip low behind the trees. The shadows grow longer, darker, and stretch across the water’s surface. There’s only a little bit of light left to pick out her face in the reflection against the black silhouette of the tree draped behind her. 

“No matter where I go,” Jamie says, even softer now, through a little hiccup of pain as the twinge pierces stronger through her chest with a severity that only doubles, “Wherever I end up, I just want you to know, Dani. My love. My best friend, my wife.” One of her wrinkled hands reaches out, a finger hovering just above the surface. It shakes where she holds it with a tremble that has long been out of her control, but the gold of her ring still glints against the surface of the darkening water. She imagines Dani is there, watching her, smiling that tender, patient smile. “It’s you.” A deep, quivering breath. “It’s me.” Another. “It’s--”

 _Us,_ comes a whisper. 

It’s a breath of air, a gust of wind. It caresses her face and slides through her snowy curls. Brushes across her old wrinkled lips with the softness of a flower petal. 

With a blink, Jamie looks down at herself in the mirrored water. Sees herself with those bright, earthy eyes, that small pinched nose, that tilted shite-eating grin she knows Dani had loved so much. She's got no wrinkles now, no laughter lines traced deep into her flesh. And there are those thick, deep auburn curls she hasn’t seen in nearly forty years. A blossom is tucked into those curls that she doesn’t remember putting there, large and pale in the dimming sunlight.

And beside her? 

A pair of blue eyes she’d never, ever forget. 


End file.
